Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to press rollers. More particularly, the disclosure relates to a press roller of a press roller system.
State of the Art
Wire, paper, rope, chain, cable, string, cord, and other similar linear-shaped materials can be looped, coiled, wound, or otherwise wrapped around a drum or other cylindrical shape that thereby acts as a spool. Wrapping a linear material around a spool is a convenient and efficient method of storing, distributing, and/or dispensing any length of the material.
Efficiently wrapping the material about the spool entails wrapping each loop of the material next to the previous loop in a back-and-forth manner along the axial length of the spool, layer upon layer, until the desired length of the material is positioned on the spool. In this manner, unwanted space between sequential loops of the linear material is avoided and the amount of material on the spool is maximized.
To facilitate the wrapping of the material around the spool, the spool is oftentimes configured to spin about an axis. This permits the material to be held in place while the spool is rotated, which rotation pulls the length of material onto the spool. To assist further, tension may be applied to the material to keep the material taught with respect to the spool. Such tension not only assists in the process of applying the material to the spool, but can also help prevent spool over-run, backlash, and/or “birdnesting.”
Backlash or “birdnesting” occurs when the tension in the material is reduced and/or the spool under-rotates or reverses course, either of which causes the material to become loose on the spool. Loose material about the spool permits the material to unravel, bunch up, and tangle on itself, such that loose loops of the material wrap around, under, and over each other in a knot or series of knots that look much like a bird's nest.
The desire to prevent backlash and “birdnesting” is present in the relevant arts and preventative measures have been introduced. Many of these preventative measures include complicated components and costly parts. For example, current preventative measures include fabricated frames that require several precision pieces of metal to be welded to one another. Moreover, to provide the desired backlash prevention, both right-handed and left-handed coil springs (torsion springs) are required to be inserted onto the fabricated frames, not to mention the insertion of rollers onto the same fabricated frame.
It would therefore be advantageous in the relative arts to improve upon these preventative measures and provide a simpler, more efficient, and cost-effective anti-backlash configuration for spools of material.